


With Delusions of Godhood

by Daughter_of_Stars



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, First Order Officers - Freeform, I'm not sure how much of a self-insert it is at this point anyway, OC is technically the main character but it starts out as Unamo's point of view, Self Insert Week 2016, Slow Burn, This Is Fine, and it's for a mary sue/self insert prompt, because Star Wars needs more lesbians, because the first chapter is just exposition with some lesbian and first order stuff, look this is the first fanfic I've written in years, sex briefly and non-explicitly mentioned
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 08:17:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6559066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daughter_of_Stars/pseuds/Daughter_of_Stars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chief Petty Officer Unamo was beginning to regret not reading the Official Background and Evaluation Files on the young ensign when she first came aboard.<br/>Maybe she should have been concerned by the new officer's forwardness. But at the time she was more concerned with whispering a suggestion in the young woman's ear, slipping an arm around her waist as she led her out of the Recreation area and up to Unamo's quarters. And by the time she realised the ensign was asking too many questions, and getting too many answers, she was already in love.</p><p>(And then the Resistance attacked and it all went to hell)</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Delusions of Godhood

Chief Petty Officer Unamo was beginning to regret not reading the official Files on the young ensign when she first came aboard.  
  
Of course, at the time there had been no reason to do that research. Groups of eager young officers joined the Finalizer regularly, if infrequently. She'd had no reason to pay attention to this batch in particular, not until she'd seen Kel waving at her across the Recreation Area. A bright eyed young woman, with a brooch of Sapphic violets pinned to her vest. The origins of that symbol were lost to the ages, but the meaning was not lost to Unamo.  
  
Maybe then she should have been concerned by the young officer's forwardness. By the way she singled her out of the crowd. By the fact that she greeted her superior by name.  
  
But Unamo was more concerned with the ensign's fingers as they traced the rim of her wineglass. The way she leant forward to hear Unamo speak. Her blush as she looked up at her through her eyelashes, violet eyes wide with interest.  
  
And then Unamo was more concerned with whispering a suggestion in the woman's ear, slipping an arm around her waist as she led her out of the Recreation area, stealing quick kisses on their way to the Officers' Quarters.  
  
And by the next morning it seemed too late to be concerned with things like Official Evaluations and Background Records. The time to appraise a potential partner had passed, and Unamo didn't want to question her luck. It had been far too long since she'd had another woman to share her bed with, let alone one who wanted to trace her jawline with light kisses and murmur what sounded like poetry as they held each other.  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
She had, looking back, overlooked quite a few warning signs in the name of 'not questioning her luck'. Kel was so inquisitive, slipping in questions about Unamo's position and job as she asked her lover how her day had gone. And while Unamo hadn't forced Kel's career upwards, she'd certainly helped in small ways. Suggested her for certain assignments, mentioned her name in certain conversations, provided tips on dealing with certain questions.  
  
Kel had made sub-lieutenant within two months. The First Order knew it lacked manpower, as well the command force needed to run their military, and so was quick to promote promising young officers.  
  
Unamo herself was part of the crew running the bridge of the Finalizer, a tightly-knit task force that General Hux had personally and intensely trained. Unamo expected to move up the bridge ranks over time, taking on more responsibilities and supervising more officers. That did not include a transition into the Command structure. She knew the dangers involved in being such a political target, and she also knew her strengths were in the technical aspects of the ship. Kel's contrasting attitude towards her career was somewhat alarming.  
  
But then again, Kel was an officer, fresh out of the Academy, filled with visions of the First Order and their innate destiny to rule the galaxy. It was only natural that she would be enthusiastic about rising through the ranks. Enthusiasm wasn't a bad thing on the Finalizer. Efficient and controlled enthusiasm was rewarded. Sub-lieutenant, the position for ensigns being trained for command positions, was Kel's reward for using all of Unamo's suggestions to her advantage.  
  
Kel didn't stop looking upwards. Within a year of her arrival on the Finalizer, she was already planning to transfer off. Starkiller Base was near completion. As the centre of the First Order's military might, it was growing a huge crew of stormtroopers, technicians, strategicians, and officers. Kel was going to be promoted to lieutenant, given a small platoon of the Base's pilots, and a place at the strategy conferences. True, that place would be at the back of the room, keeping her mouth shut and her ears open - but Kel knew that such a place would provide her with valuable information and secrets.  
  
Unamo was honestly surprised that she'd kept her young ensign's company this long, but for once in their relationship she pushed her luck, trying to keep her lover in her arms and bed and ship. She wondered out loud, casually, if Kel was really going to be able to make a name for herself among all those officers on Starkiller Base. She joked, casually, at how much better their quarters on the Finalizer could be if they made their partnership official. She kissed her deeper, held her tighter, loved her fiercer.  
  
Later, she broke about ten different regulations and sneaked Kel into the senior command staff quarters, up near the bridge. There was a viewport there, huge and filled with stars, taking up an entire wall and taking the entire room into outer space. It was beautiful, and Unamo wanted desperately to make Kel see that beauty, to make her understand everything she could have aboard the Finalizer.  
  
Kel was spell bound, standing against the glass, star struck, as her vision filled with the immensity of the galaxy. When she turned to look at her loved, whispering 'thank you', Unamo knew she had lost her. The look in her eyes was not awe, not appreciation of the grandeur. It was desire. Ambition. Unamo had been wrong to try to offer her the stars. They already belonged to Kel.  
  
Every joke about better quarters had just been another reason for Kel to rise higher in the ranks. Every caution about how Kel would be surrounded by more important officers was just another reminder of the power she wanted. Unamo gave up, deciding to just treasure as much of Kel's time as she could before the young woman left her for greater things.  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
Kel had been studying the Starkiller Base plans for months to prepare for the promotion. Technically, an Ensign only had access to the lower level specs of the Base. But Kel's superiors appreciated her enthusiasm in her job, and Unamo appreciated her enthusiasm in bed, and Kel found herself with the keys to several plan specs that she shouldn't have been able to see. In fact, she shouldn't have been able to understand them.  
  
At first, she couldn't understand them. She studied more. She tried gently flirting with a few engineering technicians to learn more about how exactly the superweapon worked. She knew that quintessence was a form of dark energy, but thanks to a slightly inebriated young Lieutenant Colonel and his enthusiasm for explaining things, she learned exactly how it was collected and stored.  
  
And Unamo, focussing more on Kel now than she had for their entire relationship, was beginning to see all this. The flirting, the gentle questions, the constant gathering of information. Kel's manipulation was slight, gentle, mutually beneficial - but manipulative all the same. She began wondering, in the back of her mind, what exactly was in Kel's official Psychological Evaluation.  
  
Before she could get too concerned, though, Kel failed to show up at Unamo's quarters one evening. Unamo was halfway to her lover's quarters before she considered that sex might be a regular part of Kel's manipulations. The worry about what - who - she might find in Kel's room was still throbbing at the base of her skull when the door slid open.  
  
Kel was alone in the dimly lit room, clothed, leaning over her desk, studying a detailed hologram of Starkiller (if Unamo's concerns weren't still hidden in the back of her mind, she would have given that hologram a second glance. Even with higher access from her mentors and lover, Kel shouldn't have had a model that detailed, that explicit.) She looked up, brow creased, when Unamo came to stand beside her. She apologised vaguely - she'd lost track of time as she tried to put together the pieces of the hologram model on her desk. Unamo bent to kiss her neck, forgiving her absence, reminding her of their arrangement, but - "There's a fault in the design."  
  
Kel's voice was high-pitched by fear, her eyes wide in the low light, her finger almost trembling as she drew her lover's attention to the model. "Unamo." She said her lover's name desperately, wretchedly, "Starkiller is flawed. Vulnerable."  
  
Unamo stood in uncomprehending silence, not seeing the flaw in the holographic lines of the thermal oscillator.  
  
"Your model is unlikely to be up-to-date, Kel, I'm sure any mistakes in the design have been corrected by now-"  
  
But Kel was shaking her head. It wasn't a small mistake. The entire design led to a vulnerability.  
  
Unamo wondered, at the back of the mind, why Kel was so distraught. Was she worried she would be attacked while stationed there? Concerned for the potential devastation to the First Order? Afraid her command would disintegrate before she had a chance to take power?  
  
But then Kel stepped forward to embrace Unamo, burying her head in her shoulder, as though her whole body was asking for comfort. And Unamo was soothing her, telling her General Hux knew what he was doing, Starkiller Base was safe, that if she was really concerned then they would file an official notice of their concerns, everything was going to be okay. Eventually it seemed to work, and Kel shifted against Unamo - still holding her close, but no longer seeking simple comfort. And her lover's concerns were pushed away by the touch of her lips.  
  
An hour later, Unamo, laying back against Kel's bed, reflected on how few times she'd even been in Kel's quarters. It had always made more sense for them to share Unamo's bed, for the greater space, and privacy, and comfort. There had been an odd sort of intimacy in the way Kel drew her lover onto her bed. Unamo was suddenly reassured about their relationship - Kel had trusted her with her fears, with her private spaces.  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
Kel did file those official notices, several of them, each one more frantic than the last. But she couldn't explain exactly how she got all her information - even for First Order standards, her research had required too much manipulation and disregard for hierarchy.  
  
So her notices went through as standard Ensign reports, and were subsequently ignored. Filed away with the rest, until General Hux had several hours free to go over a bunch of ignorant young upstart's opinions of his plans (somehow, even the incredibly organised and meticulous General never found time for those reports).  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
When Starkiller fired for the first time, Kel was standing in formation on the Base alongside the other lieutenants. General Hux spat his fury over the assembled troops, his rage filling them with the kind of mob energy that razed cities. Then the crimson fire burst over the mountains and every other emotion in Kel gave way as the phantom energy raced upwards into the sky. It was like bass-heavy music echoing in her bones, only this energy echoed in her soul. It was fire and power and destruction and she felt like she could reach out her hands and fall upwards into that incandescent violence.  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
When Starkiller fired for the second time, Kel was off duty, onboard the Finalizer, having slipped past the guards around the senior staff quarters on her way to Unamo's viewport. She was standing against that wall of stars, the ship having been oriented to include the Base planet in her view. She wanted to see the phantom energy as it burst from the planet, slipping into hyperspace, splitting the fabric of the universe apart.  
  
Instead she saw the battle fought over the surface, saw the Resistance TIE fighters slip between the First Order pilots (her squadron must have been down there, subsumed into her Commander's unit), and then - she saw the Base, collapsing in on itself. The explosion, the fires, then the shock-waves, then rocks and metal and gravity and the planet tore itself apart and she was on her knees at the window, crying out as her squadron was pulled into the collapse, her future twisted in on itself, her world shattered.  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
When General Hux was standing among the wreckage of his career, his army decimated, his superweapon obliterated, he allowed himself no more than a minute to feel the soul-wrenching despair. His anger burned cold, violent but constrained, pushing him to find out exactly what had gone wrong, who was to blame, what he could fix. He would take back control of his Order, and he would destroy those who had thought to thwart him.  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
Unamo knew that that the rest of the Finalizer crew felt as shattered as she did. Their greatest loss, in the moment of their greatest triumph. They moved through their tasks on the bridge numbed, efficient and precise only through the grace of their training. She watched, as though from a distance, General Hux stride through the ship, somehow still burning with the cold energy that always powered him.  
  
She found it within herself to be glad, desperately glad, that Kel had not been lost as well. That she was alive and whole and in her lover's bed. Kel burned, too, a beacon of emotion in the numbness that surrounded Unamo. Kel had been promoted in the wake of the great Loss, now a Lieutenant Commander in charge of reorganising the TIE fighters that had escaped their collapsing Base. She worked long shifts, spending her off hours talking to the pilots, trying to get a better idea of how to organise and lead them. When she finally left her work, she was a passionate lover, as though she was trying to fuck her way through her rage and sorrow. Unamo let her try, taking comfort in her touch and presence and passion, not needing much else.  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
A week after the Loss (not long after Lord Ren had been transferred from medbay to a shuttle to a planet that was not on any of Unamo's star charts), the bridge techs finished compiling all of the sensor data from the collapse. They ran it through the computer, then by the engineers, then to the statisticians, and finally onto the General's desk.  
  
Within another week a stormtrooper had arrived in the TIE fighter hangar bay and entered Kel's makeshift office, firmly escorting her out and up to the command centre. Kel did not doubt the reason for her arrest.  
  
When the trooper indicated the door to a conference room, Kel took a deep breath. She had no defence, nothing to say that would excuse either her treason in acquiring the Starkiller data or her treason in not making sure the fatal flaw was corrected. She did not expect to walk back out of those doors.  
  
\- - - - - - - - -  
  
Unamo was on the bridge when General Hux had been reading through the sensor reports on his datapad. He still ran his ship with brutal efficiency, but had distributed most of the work involved in recovering from the Loss to junior officers, as a sort of vicious proving ground. He himself had spent the last week devoted to Starkiller's destruction. Unamo would not have been surprised to hear he hadn't slept since the Loss.  
  
Unamo had heard his sharp intake of breath, the cessation of his pacing. She'd seen him stride off minutes later, the cold fire within him suddenly blazing. Quick words were exchanged with the stormtrooper near the door, then he walked off into the corridor that connected the bridge to the conference rooms.  
  
Unamo thought to herself, distantly, _Oh. He's found who to blame for the Loss. Someone's going to die today._ She didn't think of her lover, of all the reports Kel had sent in. She hadn't wanted Kel's concerns to be true, had never connected them to the Loss. She didn't know Kel was the one who would be walking into that conference room to face the General.  
  
And so Unamo had no idea why a message appeared on her console, half an hour later, summoning her to that same room.

**Author's Note:**

> From that-vicious-vixen on tumblr:  
> Mary Sues and self-inserts have gotten a bad rap. What started as a fun way to interact with a fandom or genre has turned into a joke. When the hell did we start taking fandom so seriously?  
> So we’re doing it. We’re putting ourselves back in the stories.  
> SELF-INSERT WEEK 2016  
> What is it?  
> Just a fun reason to make ourselves into the awesome characters we daydream up while going about our normal lives! Through the week people will be encouraged to post self-insert fic and fanart under the tag “Self Insert Week 2016.” The only rule is that you’re the main character!
> 
> \- - - -
> 
> I swear Kel is a self-insert. She's a slightly cooler and more efficient version of me, but then this whole scenario did start as a daydream fantasy. Featuring Kate Fleetwood, and later, galactic domination.  
> (also featuring too many words i mean holy fuck this was supposed to be a short drabble and now has multiple chapters)


End file.
